24.7.14

Sabir Mustafa's selfie with Sheikh Hasina

The one thing you can rely on from a broad section of deshis, is their vanity.

Below is an exhibit of one of those bits of Facebook ephemera that tell us a story of how sycophancy works among a certain circle of people in Bangladesh. It is a photograph and comment stream from the BBC World Service Bengali Editor Sabir Mustafa with Prime Minister of Bangladesh. It was taken at the London Hilton on Park Lane in the early afternoon of 23rd July 2014, where Hasina is staying with a retinue of 56 people to attend David Cameron's Girl Summit on FGM and early marriage.

FGM, which is what the papers have made a bit deal about, is not an issue in Bangladesh, but I guess she was required as some kind of senior ethnic presence, to pose for the camera like a good moderate Muslim woman awaiting a gallant white man to rescue her. Her car was reportedly pelted with shoes leaving Downing Street.

Its all pretty pathetic really, I would really have liked to have seen a section of decolonial protest register their disapproval of Hasina and her regime in a significant, dignified and more creative way. Hasina's Information Minister Hasanul Huq Inu was egged some months ago, and it was very meaningful but could have been so much more. This Saturday's demonstration for Palestine passes close by the hotel, and the Tarawih prayers at the Qatari-Mayfair mosque are on the doorstep.

It is an indictment of the arabcentric and feebleness of deshward activism amongst our generation in the UK, that this illegitimate regime's officials and securocrats, with blood on their hands, can to and fro from Dhaka to London without any hindrance.

Midnight waaz anybody? Maybe next time.

Both Hasina and Mustafa have been instrumental in the manipulation of the fascistic mood and the production of unfreedom in Bangladesh, where a sham government rules and opposition expression and mobilisation remains suppressed and the fear of poverty still immobilises the middle class.